1. Technical Field
The invention disclosed broadly relates to automated mail processing and more particularly relates to the use of real time mail volume statistics obtained prior to sorting operations at the destination postal region.
2. Background Information
U.S. Pat. No. 5,031,223, entitled "System and Method for Deferred Processing of OCR Scanned Mail" by Walter S. Rosenbaum, et al., assigned to the IBM Corporation and incorporated herein by reference, describes the compilation of statistics indicating the volume of mail pieces directed to particular addressees and destination postal regions. The Rosenbaum, et al. patent describes that such statistics may be used to allocate postal resources at particular destination postal regions to accommodate large volume mail directed to particular addressees.
What is needed in the prior art is an improved means for optimizing the sorting of mail at a destination postal region and the mapping of the mail down to carrier walk sequence, based upon the anticipated pattern of mail volumes to the recipients in that destination region.